Mixing Collars, PSA Makes Light Blue Higher Education

This post explores earning as an academic and as a blue-collar worker, both of which I have done for extended periods of time and often with overlap. I make the case that the vocationalization of higher education – the notion that the pillar’s principal personal and public value is to help land a job that satisfies a return on investment – is forced on us by the institutional model that we have inherited without necessity or challenge. I disclaim our inheritance of university and college employers, and offer an alternative in the professional service and stewardship model for higher education.

Starting my second year of faculty employment with Saint Mary’s University, I received mail at my home from SMU informing me that I was placed on probation and no longer permitted to enter campus or use university facilities. The first claim was true, but in Canada campuses and facilities such as university libraries are open to the public and the institutional employer-enroller cannot deny me access merely because I managed to fail all courses in my first year of an undergraduate anthropology degree.

25 Years Ago In the Academe: Same Shit Different Day

It’s worth reaching back to the start of this century, to an exchange between two academics in Canada, to see how meaningful improvement is not coming to higher education so long as the university and college model remains unchallenged. I do not mean challenge to some peculiarity of its players, positions, policies, procedures, processes, or practices, but a winner-takes-all contest. At any rate, improvement is not coming from academics who fail to see beyond the campuses they cling to for validation and vacation, memory and mortgage; beyond the peaks and valleys of unionists, trustees, capitalists, and politicians that interfere with proper stewardship of higher education.

To see how the Professional Society of Academics (PSA) offers better, the model is inserted as a third party to this cookie-cutter academic exchange between two academics. Exposition is provided by exposing the fundamental irrelevance and practical impotence of such exchanges to the well-being of higher education, and how such dialogue is happening still, a quarter century later in a similarly charged academe, and still at the expense of the social pillar.

This must stop. Not by getting your version of your institution in a secure enough position to act as some paradigm for generations to come. It’s by doing exactly the opposite. It’s by recognizing that Oxford, Stanford, Melbourne, McGill, Peking and the rest are the price of an inheritance. They are instruments in a service and stewardship model. They are not higher education. They are not the only means of providing the teaching, researching and community servicing of higher education. They are not many things that they need to be in fulfillment of their social contract, but principally, they are not required.

Dear Donald, Wanna Re-Open Trump University for the Greater Good?

Dear Donald Trump,

You opened a university and closed it with a court settlement. Without caring about fault, how'd you like to right that wrong and contribute much more to higher education besides?

Included in the case was a penalty of up to $1 million for operating an unlicensed university in the state of New York. I care about this misdemeanor offence which government assesses in its control of higher education. I think this crime should concern everyone. I think it directly concerns you, Donald.

When you were opening Trump University I was working as an adjunct at two universities in my hometown and completing a PhD on the Hard Problem of consciousness. Years before, in the early 90s, I was co-creating and promoting an alternative model for the service and stewardship of higher education. Along with Dr Peter March and Dr Robert Ansel, this profession-based model is our response to the obvious truth that everyone's higher education inheritance is fucked, like some twisted conditions in a crackpot last will from a prickly distant relative, we inherited universities and colleges.

I offer wholesale change, in a new social contact, in the now.

Dear Donald, Wanna Open Trump University Again?

Dear Donald Trump,

Straight to the point, you look to adjustment higher education. I look to turn it inside out so there is no increased demand for public funding, no more exploitation and digitization of academics, nor leaning on labour unions, alumni donors, venture capitalists, accreditation boards, and departments of (higher) education. I offer a shift in paradigm from our inheritance.

Academic Freedom On A Model Diet - Parts 2-5

This is the second post of a series that uses interview responses from an expert on the academy to show how academics are failing us even in the most basic of functions. Hank Reichman is the academic I choose for demonstration purposes and he is interviewed by James Vernon.

This failure of academics is not easily detected. It is hidden in language and life that has evolved over centuries of reference to the inherited model of university and college service and stewardship for higher education. This institutional model is an only child of a dysfunctional heritage so deeply rooted in our concepts and cultures that the institutions have become synonymous with the education, research, and community service of higher education. The brand has become the product, like Kleenex or Tampons.

[NOTE: The plan was to write a five-part series, fading out on the fifth interview response because the job had been done (probably to the point of ad nauseum) or I couldn't bare the task any longer (again, from nausea). Instead, I dumped the lot here. So, there are four posts presented here as they were meant for separate publication, starting with this post two. Post one is found here.]

I aim to expose this mental magic for what it is: unnecessary and destructive. Though there are many unnecessary sources of destruction in universities and colleges, academic freedom is the focus of this series, because it is the focus of the interview. Hank has written books on the subject. I don’t have the resources or resolve to do for those texts what I do in this series for the text of this interview, but I'd bet on the results being the same: While they grow up to pick up a ball that has been rolling for centuries in a game whose rules they did not design and do not doubt, Hank and the Hornets assume the inheritance. This is a serious omission for academics. It is a breach of social contract.

I teach critical thinking. One of the toughest areas of thinking to instruct is the assumption. Inference is a tricky bugger too, acting like a ghostly glue between premise and conclusion. But the assumption is a hidden gem in reasoning, because finding them makes or breaks your position. Let’s continue to mine for gems and better positions.